Theory perspective: SCES 2016

Abstract

New discoveries and developments in almost every area of correlated electron physics were presented at SCES 2016. Here, I provide a personal perspective on some of these developments, highlighting some new ideas in computational physics, discussing the ‘hidden order’ challenges of cuprate and heavy electron superconductors, the mysterious bulk excitations of the topological Kondo insulator and new progress in research on quantum spin ice, iron-based superconductors and quantum criticality.

Keywords:

• Correlated electrons
• quantum matter
• topological Kondo insulators
• spin liquids
• quantum criticality

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the United States Department of Energy Basic Energy Sciences grant DE-FG02-99ER45790 and United States National Science Foundation grant NSF DMR 1309929. This article was written while at the Aspen Center for Physics, which is supported by National Science Foundation grant PHY-1066293. I should like to thank Meigan Aronson, Colin Broholm, Girsh Blumberg, Po-Yao Chang, Xi Dai, Onur Erten, Gilbert Lonzarich, Suchitra Sebastian, Liling Sun, Joe Thompson, Yoshi Tokiwa, Hai Hu Wen and Changming Yue for discussions related to their work and this talk. My thanks to the organisers of SCES 2016, which was truly a memorable conference. Finally, my sincere apologies to the authors of the many wonderful talks and posters that I heard and visited, but was unable to include in this perspective. Your work is great and I look forward to learning how it now develops.

Notes

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was partially supported by Basic Energy Sciences [grant number DE-FG02-99ER45790]; Division of Materials Research [grant number DMR-1309929]; and Division of Physics [grant number PHY-1066293].